On giving

In his De Beneficiis, Seneca presents an interesting view on giving, like giving presents, doing someone a favour, helping others, etc. (see my blog last week) His book can also be used  as a guide to giving. Nevertheless, his ideas on giving are a bit naïve and one-sided. According to Seneca, you don’t give in order to receive something back, now or later. That’s making a deal. No, you give because of the pleasure of giving as such. It’s not surprising that Seneca defended this view on giving, for he reacted to the “do ut des”-view on giving in Roman society, i.e. the view “I give in order that you give.” This is actually a kind of tit-for-tat view. But is this really nothing more than making a deal? In order to explain that the situation is more complicated, I want to say here a few words about Marcel Mauss’s famous Essai sur le don (1923-24), translated in English as The gift.
According to Mauss, giving is not simply the transfer of an object, or, if we see it wider, as Seneca did, it is not simply doing someone a favour. No, giving implies building a relationship with the receiver and therefore it is a social action. This means that after the transfer of the object or after the favour has been done – but let me talk here only about the transfer of objects – the connection between giver and receiver does not end. This is possible, of course, but if giving is seen as a social action, it is not strange to expect something in return, sooner or later. We can distinguish then three basic kinds of relationship in which objects are transferred: The market, giving, and altruism. From this point of view, what Seneca discussed in his De Beneficiis is not so much “giving” but “altruism”, while “do-ut-des” is giving in the sense of this tripartite division. It is also the giving of this tripartite division that Mauss discusses in his Essai sur le don. He makes clear that this giving is not simply making a deal, period. Making a pure deal and then the transactors go their way again is a rather late kind of dealing with each other in human development. Such transactions are market transactions, and nowadays a big part of the social relations between humans are market transactions. Nowadays, much of what a person is, his or her identity, is determined by his or her success or failure on the market, like financial success, a person’s status, network, etc. Before the development of market relations, so Mauss, social relations were built on relations of giving and returning. Giving was the basis of your personal identity. By giving you built up your status, your social relations or network, as we call it today, and so you showed your success in life, to mention a few things. But giving as the foundation of a social network, even more as the basis of society, as Mauss shows, implies that the gift must be returned in some way, maybe not immediately but sooner or later. It implies also an obligation to give plus an obligation to receive. A social gift cannot be refused by the receiver. Or, otherwise, there is a right to give and a right to receive. However, there is not one way of giving and receiving. In his book Mauss discusses different systems.
But there is no pure market, no pure giving and no pure altruism. Actually, it’s a continuum, as Baptiste Mylondo makes clear in his preface to Mauss’s Essai sur le don. Based on the work by Sandrine Frémaux, Anouk Grévin and Olivier Masclef he presents a continuum of six types of giving, between market and altruism (I think that it will also be possible to differentiate the ideas of market and altruism in a similar way):
- The gift-exchange. It’s the pure do-ut-des: You give in order to get something back.
- The relational gift. The gift is expected to be returned. You wish that the gift will be returned and you are counting on it to happen. However, the main purpose is not to receive a gift in return but to build or maintain a relationship with the receiver.
- The free gift. A return gift is not expected. There is no obligation to return the gift, although there is nothing against doing so.
- The pure gift. A return gift is not only not necessary but a return gift is out of question. Only after a “period of oblivion” the receiver can give a gift, but this must not be seen as a return gift, which would be an offense.
- The agonistic gift. The gift simply cannot be returned. It’s too big. It is meant to crush the receiver in the sense that the receiver will never be able to do something comparable in return.
- The charity gift. The gift cannot be returned because of the big inequality between giver and receiver.
However, the latter two types of gift are not so much building social relations but they produce social inequality. For receiving a gift and not being able to return it can be lowering in the literal sense. Therefore, giving cannot be considered without the option of returning. Giving is a relation between at least two persons. These makes it a social action with all possible implications that social actions can have.